Making Over Martha

by Julie M. Lippmann

Recapturing the hand she had freed, he pressed it to his lips, smiling at her reassuringly.

"I know everything. It's all right. What do you think I care?"

"But you don't know," she insisted. "I was coming to tell you. I was on my way. And then I remembered how old she is, and weak and forlorn and—I am going back to her—to comfort her. But I had been on my way to you—to tell you—tell you what I am—what I've done. I'm——"

"Hush!" commanded Dr. Ballard gently. "Be still, and you'll find it's all right. She made it right, before I left to go to Boston. She told me everything. What you had told her, what, I suppose, she has told you. Everything. She asked me to wait until you had found yourself. She said, you were an idealist—'Up in the clouds,' she put it. She feared you would draw a storm down on yourself and me, if you were trusted with your own life, at this juncture. She begged me not to press on you any more problems than you already had. She wanted you to profit by her mistakes, to have what she had missed—and to have it untarnished by regrets. It was for that she tested you. It was for that she denied herself necessaries, that, in the end, you might have plenty. She said, she must make sure you did not set money above love, as she, as—others had done before you. Talk about idealists! She managed it all very clumsily, but, at least, she tried to do right by you, according to her lights. I told her, 'twas wrong to tamper with human hearts. I told her, she had no right to try to direct human destinies. But I'd better have held my tongue. The mischief was already done. She had tampered. She had tried.... She was always hoping you would come to see she had acted in good faith. You see it now, don't you, sweetheart? You'll show her you do, when we get home, won't you—if it's not too late?"

"Too late?"

The syllables rang out with cruel sharpness.

"You don't know, then, that she is—dying?"

Katherine gave him a terrified look.

"Oh, let us go fast—fast! Dan—darling—don't let it be too late!"

It was nearing sunset when the car drove into Crewesmere.